For our final project, Julia, John, Dan and I wanted to expand upon Julia’s fantasy device from earlier in this semester and create a glove that could alleviate hand pain and tremors for people suffering from arthritis and Parkinson’s disease. The three things we wanted to make happen were to: have a heating element, use a vibrating motor to massage the top of the hand, and create compression around the hand to flatting and stabilize the fingers.
We initially started working with a Lilypad Arduino, with the hopes of making the whole unit as compact and portable as possible, but after frying the Lilypad we learned an important lesson about prototyping: things will break, wires can be the broken component in a circuit, and the first incarnations will be bigger/more cumbersome than we would like.
The basic components of our glove are:
compression glove, Arduino Duemilanove, teflon wire, Lilypad vibration motor, compact air pump, vinyl air bladder, and aquarium tubing.
The whole thing was powered by two 9v batteries and one 12v wall AC adapter. We also made a black fleece cover for the hand part and stored the power sources and microcontroller in a fashionably sequined fanny pack.
Here is a diagram of our wiring:
In this diagram, the two small components are the air pump and vibrating motor. The green wire connected to the 9v battery represents the teflon wire.
Here is our group diligently working:
And here are photos of our final project:
Intro to Physical Computing 